This is Dan. Dan is a baboon. Read, Dan, read: Monkeys in French study not struggling to find the right words

NEW YORK — Researchers have trained six Guinea baboons to distinguish real, four-letter English words such as “done” and “vast” from non-words such as “dran” and “lons.”

After six weeks, the baboons (Papio papio) learned to pick out dozens of words — as many as 308 in the case of the clever Dan, and 81 for Violette — from a sea of 7,832 non-words, the researchers report in the journal Science.

Each of the monkeys performed significantly better than 50%, which they would have scored by randomly guessing which letters formed words or non-words. They averaged almost 75% right, with some scoring 90%.

The study is “extraordinarily exciting,” said cognitive psychologist Stanislas Dehaene of the College de France in Paris, an expert on the neural basis of reading who was not involved in the research. “For the first time, we have an animal model of a key component of literacy, the recognition of the visual word form.”

The study was intended less to probe animal intelligence than to explore how a brain might learn to read. It suggests that, contrary to prevailing theory, a brain can take the first steps toward reading without having language, since baboons don’t.

Reading has long puzzled neuroscientists. Once some humans started doing it (about 5,000 years ago in the Middle East), reading spread across the ancient world so quickly that it cannot have required genetic changes and entirely new brain circuitry. Those don’t evolve quickly enough. Instead, its rapid spread suggests that reading co-opted existing neural structures.

For the new study, scientists at Aix-Marseille University in France trained the six baboons by setting up nine booths, equipped with computers and touch screens, in two trailers in the monkeys’ enclosure. The animals wandered in when they felt like it.

Once a baboon was at the screen, it was shown a string of four letters that was either a real English word (“them”) or a non-word (“telk”). The baboon learned to touch an oval on the screen when it saw a word, and a plus (+) for a non-word. Every correct response brought a reward of dry wheat.

The baboons were engaging in “orthographic processing,” said Aix-Marseille’s Jonathan Grainger, who led the study. That term means recognizing letters and their positions. It has nothing to do with sounding out a word, let alone understanding it. Still, it is a necessary early step in reading.

The scientists’ best guess as to how the animals were able to identify real words is that they learned “the statistical properties that distinguish words from non-words,” said Mr. Grainger.
Reuters